What wins you the Tour is all the work you put in over the whole year, all the background training. That is what allows you to be at your best for twenty-one days in July without having one bad day. Over the course of the season, there is not a huge difference in power output; what changes is that your weight goes down gradually, but most of all you improve your ability to maintain that power one day after another. In March, you might have that form for one day, or a few days, but you wouldn’t be able to manage to go out on a time trial like the one from Bonneville to Chartres after three weeks of racing and produce the kind of power I managed there for an hour and five minutes. That’s the difference.
It wasn’t as if I had 50 watts more in me in July than I had at Paris–Nice. It’s more marginal than that, because to win Paris–Nice you still have to be bloody good. Winning something like that would be the peak in most people’s seasons. It’s not as if I won it at 80 per cent. I probably raced the Tour de France in 2009 at the form I was at in Paris–Nice in 2012; I might have been good enough to come 4th in the Tour in the shape I had there, but obviously it’s that last 5 per cent that’s going to push you on to the podium in the Tour. So at Paris–Nice I was in bloody good form, at 95, 96, 97 per cent, but that last few per cent is going to come from the fine-tuning, the last bit of weight loss, being acclimatised to altitude, being acclimatised to the heat. That’s what gives you the ability to race day after day for three weeks: the seven, eight months of training before it. It’s such a different way compared to how we used to do it. Rather than starting the season in a really bad place, overweight, then building all the way through, I started at about 95 per cent.
I only competed in five races before the Tour in 2012, so it was not as if I was racing week in week out. I raced Paris–Nice, we had a week off, then we went to Catalonia; there it was just a case of riding the race and letting the mountainous terrain give me a workout. This should have been a classic example of using a race as training, but it went belly up when the final stages were snowed off. So I went home, Tim devised three tough six-hour rides, and I ended up putting in more work than my teammates did that weekend racing in the Critérium International on the hilly roads in Corsica. Then we had four weeks left until Romandie. We went away, did an altitude camp, so by the time I got back to Romandie I was ready to go again. Romandie is five days’ work, then it’s all over, and after that we had five weeks to the Dauphiné. Critically, it was not as if I was going from one race straight to the next, burning my mental reserves up as I did so.
The idea of racing yourself fit is a curious one. What Tim identified is that when you race a lot, there are times when you don’t work your body hard enough. You de-train. The trouble with racing is that sometimes mentally you can’t be bothered to compete so you just sit in the peloton and it becomes a way of getting the hours in, cruising along. It can end up a bit like sitting on the rollers.
That’s even the case in the Tour. The first few days of the Tour should be relatively easy, sitting in the peloton for 200km in a flat stage. If there’s a wind or bad weather that changes it, but the first 200km you’re just sitting in, chatting with your mates. It’s the last 50km that are bloody hard because you have to stay in position, the speed goes up massively, and by the end of the stage when they download the SRM boxes from your handlebars you learn that you’ve only averaged 190 watts for the day. You could go out and do a five-hour training ride harder than that.
That is precisely why at Sky we still did some bloody hard rides up to five days out from the Tour, rather than backing off for two weeks beforehand. Tim was saying that you could get to a point ten days into the Tour and find that all of a sudden you haven’t trained really hard for a month so you’ve de-trained before you hit the mountains. That means that when you start making those really intense efforts it comes as a massive shock to the system. If you were in the last week before the World Road Race Championships, three days out you’d go and do a big effort, a big ride.
Clearly, we got our preparation for the Tour spot on, but what made all the difference was having people like Tim in the background, asking those questions. Building up to the Tour was about defying tradition, not being scared to try out new ideas. I think we were vocal about this in the first year of Sky, when we were determined that this was what we were going to do. That was always Dave Brailsford’s goal for the team: changing the way we think, defying received ideas, asking why’s it always been done like this. The most obvious example, and the simplest one, is warming down at the end of the stage. How many teams are doing that now? But when we started warming down in 2011 everyone laughed: ‘What are they doing? Look at them idiots.’ But it makes total sense: you warm up, so why not warm down? At times the overall philosophy didn’t work, or we started to look stupid, but we are still sticking with it, and we are still learning from our mistakes. The difference is that now it’s all working and people are praising Dave and everyone else. I think we’re setting a precedent for how it’s done in the future.
Another radical change in the way we built up to the Tour was our two-week training camps at altitude in Tenerife, staying at the Hotel Parador on top of Mount Teide, the volcano in the middle of the island. We did one camp in April, but the second one in mid–late May six weeks before the Tour was probably the most important. Quite a lot of Tour de France mountain stages finish high up so the main goal was to be able to perform at altitude without any drop-off in power. Another massive plus of Tenerife was that we were pretty secluded, with no distractions and nobody about. That meant we could get the work done – plenty of climbing, key blocks of specific training – and sleep every other hour. It was ideal.
The altitude training dated back to the big rethink of 2010. Tim’s view was that in that Tour I had been really struggling with the altitude, especially whenever the race went over 1,600m, which he calculated was eleven times. He said, ‘We’ve got to train for altitude’, but he was also asking the question: ‘What do we need to do at altitude? If we’re going there for two weeks we’ve got to know what we’re doing.’ So Tim went to Tenerife in January 2011 to check the place out. He went around all the roads, looked into how other people were training at altitude, and came up with plans of what he thought we should do. He really did his homework. We went there straight after the Tour of Romandie in 2011, did two weeks and realised we’d latched on to something. We felt we had to do it again in 2012, more and better, so we planned two camps. We had gone to Sestriere in 2011, up in the Alps on the border between Italy and France. That didn’t work out so well, because the weather doesn’t tend to be as good as in Tenerife and you have no choice but to ride down from the resort to train. In Tenerife you can do a two- or three-hour ride at 2,000m, if that’s what the trainers feel you need.
From each camp we did at altitude, we seemed to be getting a bit more information to make the next one better. There is a difference between training at altitude, which can be pretty damaging, and acclimatisation to altitude, where you just let your body adapt to the thinner air. There is a well-known benefit from being at altitude: as your body adapts, it naturally produces more red blood cells, increasing your body’s capacity to carry oxygen to the muscles and improving your performance that way. This is what most people think of as ‘altitude training’, but this wasn’t our goal. What we wanted to do in 2012, with the core of the Tour team at those camps, was acclimatise; get our bodies used to performing in that thin air so that we would all be able to do it at the Tour.
The toughest thing with training at altitude is getting the right balance: Tim had decided that the issue was doing enough work to get an improvement in performance, but without overdoing it, given the demands altitude makes on the body. You can’t fail to get the efforts in when you’re in Tenerife because the climbs up to Mount Teide last for a minimum of 30km: a camp like this is where you always do the hardest work of the year, because there is no compromise when you are away from home, it’s just you, your teammates, and the trainers. A
s for acclimatisation, just being there and sleeping there is enough. We ended up training mainly on the roads down below, then riding up to the hotel again. We didn’t stay up on the top and train hard at 2,000m because that’s quite damaging to the body as your system fights to work hard in spite of the thin air; that’s probably the most destructive way of training because, in addition to the effort, you are taking more time to recover due to sleeping at altitude. But if we had an easy hour or two on a rest day, we didn’t bother going down.
The goal in the plan was to do 100,000m of climbing between March and June. That sums up that period. If you worked it out it was about 10,000m a week – a little bit more than the equivalent of going from sea level to the top of Everest. It was clear that if I was going to win the Tour I was going to have to do a lot of climbing, so at first just going up the hills would help in itself, but later on the work I had to do on those climbs was very specific. In Tenerife in April, between Paris–Nice and Romandie, we were doing five or six hours a day, just putting in a lot of mid-range effort. It’s the kind of climbing you’ll do on the Tour on the first climb of the day when a team is riding tempo on the front and there are three cols to go. We were putting down a big fitness base so that when we came to Tenerife the second time, we were even fitter, so we could tolerate doing the really high-workload stuff. At the second camp, in the big, intense sessions, we might do as much as an hour and a half of threshold, working at the point where your body is producing lactate as fast as it can process it – in other words, the point where if you go any harder you crack rapidly. That would all be on climbs: pure hard work.
The critical thing is that I couldn’t have done any of this without all the background training going back to November. Everything I did from then onwards was building on that foundation, with the workload continually getting longer and more intense; that meant when I got to Tenerife in late May I was able to train so hard that I could not only finish the efforts, but I didn’t dig myself into such a hole that I needed a week off when I got back. That is part of the philosophy that swimmers train to: daily grind. It’s bloody hard work.
After one of those rides we do in Tenerife you feel incredible satisfaction: that’s another day in the bank. To take one day in the second camp as an example, I was doing the last effort, we’d done five and a half hours, the average temperature had been thirty-five degrees all day. We got to the last climb, we’d done 4,000m of climbing, we had one more twenty-five-minute effort to go, and three of the guys were wasted – Froomie, Richie Porte and Christian Knees – they couldn’t do the last effort so they rode up the climb to get home. Me, Mick Rogers and Kosta Siutsou did the last effort; those are the moments when you realise, if I can do this one now, that’s the Tour winner. We used to get days like that on the track where that’s the difference: whether you can do that effort or not.
The last stint we did was twenty-five minutes, starting at 1,500m altitude and going to 2,200. We would ride one minute at 550 watts, basically prologue power, which you can sustain for a few minutes, then four minutes at threshold torque – 50rpm at threshold, maybe 400–440 watts depending on the altitude, which is bloody hard to do because riding in the big ring, say a 53x16 gear, at threshold on a climb is like going up a steep hill in your car with your foot to the floor in fourth – then down to the little ring to start again and do 550 watts for one minute. So five sets of five minutes, alternating normal cadence and high power for a minute, low cadence and threshold power for four. We’d already done five and a half hours, one hour at threshold, so the last five minutes is horrible; you’re at 2,000m, you can hardly breathe but you realise that in the Tour you will be glad you’ve put yourself through this.
It’s hard to put into layman’s terms how you feel. It’s a nice way of being wasted. When you are fit and your form is great those efforts are hard in a very sweet way. Sometimes you haven’t got the form and you are suffering, but if you are hurting when the form’s good, it can be an incredible feeling. When you are getting dropped in a race it’s horrible, a lot of people who ride sportives and so on would be able to relate to that. But when you are off the front as I was in Paris–Nice that March or leading a time trial, it’s a different kind of pain altogether. At the top end it’s a very sweet pain. It’s mixed with the endorphins you get from the effort; it’s what makes you able to push even harder. I’ve been at both ends of the spectrum.
I quite like the boredom when we’re on camp in Tenerife. It’s quite peaceful, and when you’re training that hard it’s nice to come back and not have any distraction. There’s no sitting on the Internet and we haven’t got Sky television in the room so you find yourself doing the most basic things: reading a book or watching DVDs. We tend to watch a lot of films and that’s about it really. You’re living like a monk. It’s not even somewhere you could bring the family as there is nothing for them to do. You feel you are doing something that no one else is doing. It’s the most extreme thing and I like that too, the sacrifice of it. Training to win the Tour takes a lot of sacrifice in all our lives – by the other team members, but most of all by my family. You get to a point in your career – I had it with the track – where you tell yourself you are no longer going to compromise. I didn’t want to look back in ten years’ time and wonder what I might have achieved. I don’t want to have any regrets.
CHAPTER 8
* * *
THE MIDAS TOUCH
AT THE TOUR of Romandie I couldn’t help feeling that something special might be on its way. I was growing in confidence. At times, what was happening seemed almost too good to be true. There were days on those roads on the west side of Switzerland in late April when everything I touched seemed to turn to gold. Sometimes I felt as if I could do no wrong. It was a feeling I had never had before. I had sensed it at times on the track maybe, at an Olympic Games or a World’s, but had never come anywhere near it when competing on the road, not even in 2009. I was starting to feel almost untouchable.
Romandie began well for us when Geraint Thomas used his pursuit skills to win the prologue; again I was a victim of the weather. It started raining ten minutes before I got to the start line, and I finished 11th. Without that, I’d have been very close to G, so from that moment on I knew I was in bloody good shape. I actually suspected it from the days after I’d come back from altitude training. The first stage was when eyebrows were raised as I managed something I hadn’t achieved since I was an amateur: a bunch sprint win.
That day into La Chaux-de-Fonds was a tough stage. We went up some decent climbs in the finale and it whittled the group down quite a bit. There weren’t many bodies left at the end. I had a little bit of swagger about me, a feeling that, ‘Yeah, I’m here to win the race’, so I put the boys on the front early on to ride tempo behind the break. When a team does that it’s always a statement of intent – ‘We’re going to take responsibility and try to win this.’ Ultimately, it was our directeur sportif Sean Yates’s decision to take control, but it was also an example of how I was beginning to ride like a leader: I put my hand up, saying, ‘I want to win it, I will take the responsibility.’ In doing that, there’s a thought process you have to go through. You think, ‘Right, the break’s up the road, BMC aren’t going to ride because Cadel Evans has said he’s not here to win the race, there are no other big sprinters here, so we’re going to have to take it on, and we’re going to have to ride.’ You think: ‘I’m quite happy with that, let’s do it.’
We lost Cav over the climbs, so he wasn’t there to go for the sprint finish. After we got over the penultimate little hill with about 20km to go, I punctured; there were a few attacks while I was getting a wheel change, which meant that as well as the adrenaline you get after a chase through the support cars, I had the hump a little bit when I got back to the front. As soon as we came back, we hit another climb, then another descent; I lost all my teammates, which left me alone with about 15km to go, so I ended up closing gaps on my own. That all made it a really tough finale. T
he peloton lined up for the stage finish with about 3km to go; I was about fourth wheel behind a little train from Rabobank, sitting there expecting to be swamped by whichever team was going to lead out the sprint. We got a little closer in; nothing had happened. Liquigas went over the top with about a kilometre and a half to go, so I swerved right and got on to their train. Everyone was just pinned to the wheels because it had been such a hard ride through the stage; we got into the final kilometre, no one came past, so I thought, ‘Sod it, I’m going.’ I put my foot down at 500m from the line, just went as hard as I could, and no one came round. That was that: it was a good ten years since I’d won a race in that way. It didn’t happen entirely by chance: I’d led out Rigoberto Urán in one stage of the Tour of Catalonia, a few guys came past me and I ended up 16th; since that stage I’d been thinking I should have just gone for it.
The win earned me a useful time bonus that, together with the fact that G had dropped out of the lead group, put me in the leader’s jersey for day two. That was pretty satisfying, but there was more to it than that. I was surprised at the win. I knew I was fast enough to win a sprint, I knew I had the length for it – it was about a 20sec push, and in training we do up to a minute in those efforts – but I was amazed that having led out for so long no one came round me. I’d won Paris–Nice, gone away, trained, come back, won the first stage in a sprint finish; it was all too good to be true. I was really happy. The press were wondering where it had come from, but I was surprised people didn’t realise I had that kind of speed in me from racing on the track. After all, that was the same kind of flat-out effort I would make when we were full on in a Madison and I was going for a lap gain, as I did with Rob Hayles in Athens and Cav at Manchester in the 2008 world championships.
Bradley Wiggins: My Time Page 9